the first big rain.

it's been a long time since i've been to the farmers' market on a tuesday.. it's usually the most quiet of the market days, but it was especially so today as the rain refused to let up. i'm kind of glad it was quiet, it gave me a chance to talk to the vendors and get the scoop on what's happening this week.

i grabbed another load of plants, as many as i could carry on the city bus. the new assortment consists of blackberry, a fig tree [should be interesting], some bush zucchini, pickling cucumbers, two types of tomato.. black cherry [the purple tomatoes!] and a heirloom variety. there's also an assortment of herbs like sage, rosemary and thyme. i've had a hard time finding eggplant, the assortment won't have as much variety as last year's plot, but it will be a good start.

so back to that rain...

all of the seeds we dropped in the ground have doubled in size since yesterday, the rain has really done them some good. matt and i stood grinning with pride at our little radishes.. we will drop some more seeds in a week or two to have some later for harvest.

tomorrow the digging shall continue, and planting what other plants we have so far. the first batch that went into the ground earlier this week are taking especially well since the rain has come. check out the bok choy!

everything is already looking delicious. the kale is so crisp, the little lettuce sprouts are starting to look like grown-up lettuce, and the pepper plants in the ground look like they will begin to flower. thursday is round two this week at the farmer's market, hopefully the rain will let up and more vendors will show with seedlings. next year hopefully we will be set to start seeds indoors, but for now we take what we can get!

can't wait to taste the rainbow... swiss chard! yay for food!

staycation in the garden.

it's been a long time since i've taken a vacation.. and this time i didn't want to travel, we are staying home this week and spending quality time in our new backyard. the experiment with the cardboard gardens continues, today we extended next to the first bed attaching the second one to it and leaving a 'key' path in between for good reach.

first we used a hard rake, pulled back the grass that was more or less dead under the cardboard we laid down a few days ago. we used a spade to turn the soil beneath, pulling out some clumps of grass, and turning some back into the ground.

after watering the turned soil, we put the cardboard back down into the shape of the bed we are creating, making sure that all of the tape has been removed from the boxes. we then watered the cardboard. on top of the cardboard we mixed a couple kinds of topsoil, one had a little more sand than the other. then we mixed in black earth, and composted sheep manure.

we rake it out into a nice even bed, leaving a 'key' path to step into for easy reach. we will leave these half-paths all along the bed spaced so that you can always reach into the center of the beds. when it comes time to plant, the soil is pulled back, and an X is cut into the cardboard. we peel back the cardboard, put some fresh soil into the hole, and drop in the plant. the soil is replaced, plus some additional rich mix is added, mulching the plant.

we added more veggies, and some annual flowers that we liked the colours of. herbs were planted in the narrow patch at the end of the 'key' path, and more annuals were planted there at the border.

last year we used white clover as a living mulch to keep soil moist, weeds down, and return nitrogen to the soil. this year we are trying something different. we are using more food between the food to take up the ground space, crowd out weeds and produce as much as we can per square foot of garden.

here we used radish seeds.. in other places we used carrots and parsnips. these radish seeds were planted only a few days ago, and already they have begun to sprout. so exciting! so far so good on the new experimental beds. on the next post, we will look into the lettuce bed!